Encyclopedia of American Loons

Friday, December 9, 2016

A crackpot of some note, Neil Huber is a Biblical literalist
with a PhD in anthropology. He used to be associated with Wisconsin State
University (though he can hardly be described as a particularly active
scientist), but renounced science in 1990 and decided “to start with the assumption of the authority of the Bible, looking at all the evidence that it
presents for trusting it. Then build your science from there, based upon the
Bible’s truth.” He is currently affiliated with the Imago Dei Institute, a
Bible college. Of course, given that he does, indeed, have a PhD, Huber is also
a signatory to the Discovery Institute’s petition A Scientific Dissent From Darwinism,
but at least he is pretty explicit that his rejection of evolution is not based
on science. He is also on the CMI’s list of scientists alive today who accept the Biblical account of creation,
even though he is not a scientist by a long shot.

There is a brief report from one of Huber’s presentations
here (which also offers summaries of presentations by John Johnson, Tom Greene and
Heinz Lycklama; the last, in particular, is a magnificent trainwreck). Huber
tries, unsurprisingly, to run the “same-evidence;
different interpretations” canard, neglecting to mention that creationists
not only interpret the evidence differently according to their presuppositions
but i) also just refuse to look at the vast majority of the evidence (the stuff
that doesn’t fit), and ii) that science also tests its presuppositions. Actually, Huber tried to address one
problem: the problem that different fossils are systematically and without
exception found in different geological strata (because they lived at different
times), which is hard to reconcile with the favorite creationist assumption
that all fossils are remnants of creatures killed in one single cataclysmic
flood.
Well, Huber claimed that fossil animals are found at different strata in a
particular order because they were running from the flood water, and so more
primitive animals were not able to outrun more advanced ones. In other words,
the moles outran the velociraptors and outflew the pterosaurs (not his
examples). He didn’t mention plants.

Wednesday, December 7, 2016

Small fish, but worth a mention. Lowell Hubbs is an online
troll whose mission is to spread FUD about vaccines and vaccine safety. Hubbs has no education or experience in any
relevant field, but tends to repeatstandard antivaxx tropes and conspiracy theories, claiming for instance that all vaccines are unsafe and
ineffective (that better sanitation and nutrition, not vaccines, account for
the decline in vaccine-preventable diseases, which is almost as delusionally
ridiculous as flat-out denying gravity); instead, vaccines apparently lead to autism,
asthma and SIDS. To hold those views, you also need some serious conspiracy
theories, and Hubbs is not afraid to go there (“I
like whale.to,
its a great site containing more real history than I know you can actually deal
with,” says Hubbs;
whale.to is a frequent source of his information,
apparently): In 2011 Hubbs even concluded that his site, lowellsfacts.com, had
been taken down by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement. It wasn’t.

Monday, December 5, 2016

Jon Hubbard is a former member of the Arkansas House of
Representatives (District 75 in Jonesboro). He is most famous, at least outside
of Arkansas, for his 2009 book Letters to
the Editor: Confessions of a Frustrated Conservative, which contains gems like this:
“the institution of slavery that the
black race has long believed to be an abomination upon its people may actually have been a blessing in disguise[because] the blacks who could endure
those conditions and circumstances would someday be rewarded with citizenship
in the greatest nation ever established upon the face of the Earth.” (The
statement was endorsed by Bryan Fischer).
The book – its publication coincided with the publication of his colleague Charles Fuqua’s book – also asserted that blacks don’t “appreciate
the value of a good education”, and that in the future immigration, both legal
and illegal, must lead to “planned wars
or extermination” which would be “as
necessary as eating and breathing”. Hubbard was not reelected in 2012.

He hasn’t mellowed down much, though, and has also later been caught raging and ranting about his efforts to save America from the “clutches of an obsessed,
liberal-socialist-globalist agenda” and how “Obama has systematically gone about his primary objective to destroy
America,” meaning, of course, promoting same-sex marriage and religious
liberty for any other groups than those fundamentalists who coincidentally
agree with Hubbard on political issues, which according to Hubbard were the
ones for whom America was created.

Diagnosis: Belongs to a special kind of fuming, rightwing
conspiracy theorist that seems notoriously populous among state legislators –
Hubbard may be gone, but there are plenty left (also in Arkansas: We’ll return
to a couple of examples later on).

Saturday, December 3, 2016

Daniel Howell has made a little bit of a name for himself
for his advocacy of barefoot running and barefoot living: going barefoot is
“natural” and “healthy” and God created us barefoot in the Garden of Eden; no,
Howell has, as far as we know, not followed that line of reasoning to its
natural conclusion and landed himself in jail. His ideas about barefoot living are
summed up in his The Barefoot Book. That’s
not the part of his mission we are most interested in here, however, though it
is the modest recognition he might have received for his barefoot stuff that
drew our attention his other activities: Howell is also a hardcore young-earth creationist;
he is a signatory to the Discovery Institute’s petition A Scientific Dissent From Darwinism and associate professor of biology (specializing in human anatomy, apparently)
at Liberty University,
no less.

Diagnosis: Sort of undermines his claims to know anything
about the biological foundations for the barefoot stuff he is promoting. Anti-scientist.

Thursday, December 1, 2016

Another legend among UFO enthusiasts, Linda Moulton Howe is
a ufologist and “investigative journalist”, and a
mainstay on the Coast to Coast AM radio show and the Ancient Aliens TV series.
She is in particular associated with cattle mutilation nonsense,
starting with her 1980 documentary A
Strange Harvest, where she investigated what she concludes to be unusual animal
deaths (but really a mix of hearsay and the readily naturally explainable)
caused by “non-human intelligence and technology”. Her conclusions were based on careful investigation of the evidence after ruling
out, prior to investigation, the possibility of a natural explanation. She
followed up with more “evidence” in
the 1989 book Alien Harvest. Howe also claims to have seen secret government documents that supposedly
prove that aliens are mutilating cattle, abducting people and generally flying
around military bases. Indeed, in 1983 she was shown a secret presidential briefing
paper that revealed how “extraterrestrials
created Jesus” and placed him on earth “to
teach mankind about love and non-violence” (but apparently also randomly mutilate cattle). The documents were allegedly
shown to her by Richard Doty.
We have covered Doty and his documents before.

Howe runs her own website called “EarthFiles.com”, which
charges a subscription fee of $45 a year to access her body of work. Some of
it, however, has been published in reputable journals disseminated in
radio programs hosted by luminaries like Art Bell,
George Noory and Whitley Strieber. That material contains, in addition to cattle mutilation tripe and reports
of “unexplained” lights and sounds
reported from all over the US:

By the way, the aliensdidit “explanation” for cattle
mutilations seems to have received some competition from even more exotic hypotheses.
Tom Bearden,
for instance, thinks the “mutilations are
the physical manifestation of the whole human unconsciousness which is somehow
aware that the Soviets will, probably within three years, invade and destroy
the Western world;” so there is that.

Diagnosis: Crazy, but her most characteristic trait seems to
be that she’s amazingly gullible and will fall for anything you serve her if it
concerns UFOs – unless it is based on reason and evidence, of course.

Tuesday, November 29, 2016

Greg Howard is a wingnut Christian financial planner and
blogger perhaps best known for his role as lead theorist in Twittergate:
when some Tea Partiers were trolled on Twitter back in 2010 they responded by
launching a twitter militia and – of course – creating an elaborate an utterly unhingedly
insane conspiracy theory, according to which Democrats must have hired a cadre
of “E-thugs” (led by a social media consultant named Neal Rauhauser) to
identify and harass prominent Tea party Twitter users and fool them into
tweeting offensive things which could then be used to smear the Tea Party. “Democratic campaign funds are being used to
front this,” said Howard, offering as evidence the observation that the “links between these people are very clear.”
Of course, what really happened was that some people realized that it was incredibly easy to get some Tea
Partiers to say stupid and offensive stuff if you prodded them a little, which
is not exactly a novel discovery; that Howard and his followers responded with paranoid
conspiracy theories is rather telling.

Of course, Howard really is
a professional conspiracy theorist. He is, for instance, a birther:
Obama is “not American” and not a
natural born citizen, and his primary goal is to sow “the seeds of racial hatred; we were healing quite well as a nation on
racial issues until Obama came along and now we have a lot of racial discord.”
Oh, and he wants to take your guns, too. He may begin “wiping out a few hundred people who own guns, pull a large scale Waco
or a Ruby Ridge type incident” and have it “tinged … with racial overtones,” and may even be building a black
army to fight the white insurgents who will fight the impending attempt to
seize our guns.
Indeed, he might even go through with his plans to “take down” the Internet, although – Howard assures us – “people are setting up phone-trees all over
the place” to stop Obama in his tracks. But be warned: “If Obama can take your guns away he can take
your car, he can take your home, he can take your bank account, he can take your
very life,” said Howard.

Diagnosis: Yeah, that kind of guy. He’s been called “The
Glenn Beck of Twitter”, and I don’t think we can come up with a better
diagnosis than that.